How the Museum of Illusions Creates Viral Marketing

0:00Okay, I have to go there. This is crazy. What is this video? It's so small, yet she's also tall. How is this person hanging upside down in this place that traditionally I'm used to looking at that you can't hang upside down? Today, we've got Andy Levy joining the show. He's the chief marketing officer at Museum of Illusions. We are a visual medium. Print doesn't really do the job. It's got to be motion to display everyone's emotions. And I say it's a FOMO experience because you want to stop scrolling when you see our content because you want to envision yourself, your family, your friends going through the museum.

0:39I think the emotional connection piece is a big one that gets lost. But if I was a B2B marketer right now, I'd be thinking, I don't think I need experiential. Or why is it important to have experiential marketing even in a SaaS product? People say, oh, well, experiential is not the same as product marketing. I disagree. When you're marketing experiential, you are marketing the product and the product is the experience. Whatever your product is, the experience doesn't have to be the physical experience, but the experience has to be something that you carry with you. That's something that I see missing a lot.

1:13And I see some very cool B2B companies that they're really bringing the emotions into their marketing and they're just doing things that are very memorable. It brings an emotion. It puts me as the hero in this story. I can see myself in this. It's funny. It's actually making me laugh. I don't hate logging in here because it just has something that's different. And I remember it. Anyone can come in and shoot a video, but what are you going to do that will leave the viewer to be like, okay, this is a scroll stopper. I want to go see this place or I love these two brands. I can't believe these people are working together.

1:50Hey, everybody. Welcome back to another episode of Marketing Trends Podcast. This is your host, Stephanie Postles, CEO and founder of Mission.org and Relevant. Andy, welcome to the show. Thanks for having me. Yeah, I'm very excited to have you. I know we're going to be going deep on a system that you've built up from the ground up, and it's something that a lot of marketers struggle with, which is experiential, scalable systems when it comes to experiential experiences. That sounds kind of funny. But before that, I would actually like you to describe Museum of Illusions for anyone who's not familiar.

2:22Yeah, I mean, we invite people to reimagine reality. So we straddle between education and entertainment. We've got 70 locations worldwide, anywhere from 8000 square feet to 13000 square feet. And when you walk into one of our museums, there are 80 different types of exhibits that are interactive. Some are analog, some are digital, some are posters on the wall. We've got reverse rooms, which is reality turned upside down. So it makes for a great photo ops, building illusions, which, you know, that's part of how we localize content as well as we take iconic buildings and the existing locations and make you climb on them.

3:06and make a great photo op of it. So, you know, I've been with Museum of Illusions for about a year now. And, you know, I always say we're the biggest brand you've never heard of. You know, we're 70 locations, like I said, worldwide. And we're growing rapidly. And, you know, it's my job to really make it a mainstream brand and really scale it and deploy it and make sure we're consistent across the board. Amazing. So we're going to get into, you know, the brand that no one's heard of, but I do want to go through quickly your background because I was looking at your LinkedIn and we talked about this a bit, but I mean, you started, I think in like the finance space and then you jumped into a lot of experiential companies.

3:46I mean, I know Cirque du Soleil is one of them. I saw you're supporting Nickelodeon, like so many different experiential event style companies. And so I would just love to hear about what drew you into this space. Yeah, I worked in finance and investment banking at the beginning of my career because it was, you know, quote unquote, the thing to do when you got out of college. I just didn't enjoy it. I was bored by it. And it was one of those things where, you know, had I stayed with it, I'd probably be much wealthier and, you know, also miserable. But the catalyst for my kind of change in, in, in pass and direction is I'll never forget.

4:25It was one Friday night. I was working on a analysis for my boss, uh, and my younger brother, uh, I think emailed me. I don't, this might've been before text or texting me, whatever. And he's like, Hey, what are you up to this weekend? And I was like, Oh, I've got a report. I've got to present Monday morning, you know, and my brother was going to college in Las Vegas. And he was like, Oh, I'm going to party with Randy Gerber and George Clooney and Cindy Crawford at this new bar that's opening up. And I was just like, well, this sucks. Why am I doing this? And so kind of from that moment on, you know, I made it a mission to get to Las Vegas because I really enjoyed the entertainment scene there.

5:10And so I ended up moving to Las Vegas, went back to school and got my hotel and restaurant degree or my master's in hotel and restaurant management. Worked my way up in the restaurant and nightlife scene, turned 30, got old, got married, which is like retirement age in the nightlife world. And then had the opportunity to work for Cirque du Soleil for six years. So three years in Vegas, three years in Montreal. Had the opportunity to move to Dubai and launch a Cirque style show in Dubai and did that for three years and then moved to LA and worked on a concept called Two-Bit Circus, which was an experiential VR arcade, our version of escape rooms called story rooms.

5:55And then worked in, you know, the field for the past couple of years and joined Museum of Illusions last year. And so for me, there's just something about these emotional experiences. Like every experiential thing is, you know, emotional, whether it's a surprise and delight, whether you're going with, you know, your spouse, your partner, your date, whether you're bringing your kids or grandparents or whatever. I love the emotional response that people take from it because you'll always remember that event, you know, and that thing you went to. And so for Cirque, obviously, you know, it was emotional product.

6:30And then as you know, I've gotten older and, you know, I had kids and my kids have gotten older, like they're, they're my beta testers at the end of the day. They're my barometers and they're the ones that I'm like, okay, if this works for them, who else will it work for? And so, you know, we spend a lot of our time, we travel a lot and we spend a lot of our time checking out all these different types of experiences and seeing like, okay, what makes this tick? What can I take from it, you know, in my job or what can I apply to it, you know, for Museum of Illusions and how can we either do a better job?

7:04How can we make it work? and how can we invite more people to experience this type of thing? Yeah, amazing. And I know for anyone listening right now who is in the B2B space and they're wondering like, is this conversation going to be relevant to me? Yes, in a little bit I am going to be diving into with Andy like the pieces that you can steal from this playbook that are very relevant to enterprise and B2B. But first I want to circle back to you mentioned that Museum of Illusions is the brand no one's heard of. And I want like I think you said the biggest brand. that no one's heard of. And I want to hear more about that.

7:39Yeah. I mean, it's one of those things like, you know, personally, it drives me nuts. I mean, I'm based in Scottsdale, Arizona. We have one a mile down the road from our office. And so when I tell people like where I work, they're like, oh, what's up? I've never heard of it. It's like right down the street. It's right there. You drive by it. Yeah. You drive by a giant billboard with it. And so I think... The challenge of it all is like we're faced with multiple in-your-face things, whether it's social, whether it's advertising, whether it's all these things. And, you know, so for me, you know, this is a great experience.

8:20It's fun. It's fun to bring your kids. We have a partnership with STEM.org. So there's an educational component. So it's not just one of those like, hey, spend money, entertain your kids for 90 minutes and there's no value in it. There is an educational component of it. We, you know, all of our exhibits are backed by science, math, all sorts of other elements. So we carry weight. And I think that's, you know, part of the challenge in this role is how do we make sure that we capture your attention? We get you to come, we get you to come back and more and more people are aware of us. And, you know, to the B2B part, there's B2B aspects of our business as well.

8:59So, yeah, I mean, it's definitely a challenge. It's a fun place, but yeah, it's not without, you know, challenges. Yeah. So what are some of the things that you're working on right now that you think are helping the most with this awareness challenge and making sure that people do know who you are and especially that you are, I mean, global, right? You're in a lot of different areas. So how are you making this, you know, increasing awareness? Yeah. I mean, so it's figuring out the playbook, as you mentioned, you know, and, you know, There's not just one universal playbook because we're in so many countries, because we're in so many different markets.

9:36In the US, every city, it's like its own country, depending on where it is. So it's coming with a master plan and adapting it. So the base is for new markets because we're expanding rapidly. We go in, we partner with a local tours board just to get introduced to all the right people. We partner with the local commerce team as well, the commerce group as well. And then we usually hire a local PR agency as well because we need boots on the ground. We have employees in each venue, but they're operational. We don't have marketing managers in each venue. We're just not big enough to do that. And so we rely heavily on local PR to really introduce us to the people that are the connectors, not just, you know, the media and influencers, but the people behind the scenes or the society types.

10:31So really trying to understand, you know, the market, what makes it tick, what's been successful from other similar attractions, what's failed and where we can adapt. And so, you know, we are also, you know, a visual medium, you know, like a print, you know, know, it doesn't really do the job. It's got to be motion to, you know, display everyone's emotions. And, you know, I say it's a FOMO experience because you want to stop scrolling when you see our content because you want to envision yourself, your family, your friends, whomever going through the museum. And so we invest a lot in content. We invest a lot in, you know, really digital ads, TikTok, meta, those types of platforms to get you to stop scrolling and be like, okay, I have to go there.

11:24This is crazy. What is this video or what is this photo? How is this person hanging upside down in this place that traditionally I'm used to looking at that you can't hang upside down? It's a complex playbook, multi-layer and knowing when to pull certain members at certain times. We have themes throughout the year. We have LTOs and promotions we do throughout the year. And then certain museums will undergo refreshes every couple of years and we reinvigorate with new content and new rooms and new experiences as well. That's amazing. It sounds like a lot going on. I'm assuming, I mean, it's really smart having those local partners where you can really understand what's happening in the city and getting guidance.

12:07Is there ever a time where you rolled out a playbook in one city and then you did a similar one and it just flopped because you had missing pieces or you didn't really understand what was happening in the culture of a city? Maybe it's like SF versus Austin. Any stories around that? They're always different. We're in Las Vegas and Las Vegas is a completely different market than Santa Monica that's opening up in October that I've worked in before. Las Vegas, your tourist base is churning every 48 to 72 hours. Now you also have macroeconomic conditions where the same tourists that you counted on last year are not coming in.

12:47But our targets don't change, right? So how do you get that same amount of people coming in despite those challenges? Or we're in certain locations where there's not a high amount of foot traffic. So how do we make ourselves a destination or in other locations where there's a ton of foot traffic. So how do we get people to stop, you know, what they're doing, you know, in that foot traffic avenue and come to us. So it's, it's always a challenge. And like I said, every market is different and they're nuanced. There are certain times of year, there are certain weather conditions, seasonality, things are, are different.

13:27We're about to open on Australia and Q4 as well. And so that presents itself with kind of opposite challenges as well. Like, you know, we're looking to open in December and January and that's summer and it's Christmas and it's school break there. And so it's like figuring out all these different levers that are like, wow, Christmas, school break, how do we deal with this? How do we provide a gift giving message? How do we provide a summer break message? How do we create awareness? And so it's really trying to figure all that out, prioritize, and then, you know, test and iterate to see, okay, what's sticking?

14:06What's working? You know, where do we invest? Where do we pull back? And what does it mean? It seems like you need a massive amount of data to be able to see all these data points together. I mean, you're mentioning weather and school and like, you know, what people are excited about right now. And like Las Vegas maybe is a one time thing when someone comes versus Santa Monica, you hope to bring someone back consistently. consistently. How much of this is partnering with these local partners, let's just say the PR companies, and how much is it just going and scraping mass amounts of data at a local level and trying to converge it in a way that actually helps influence these plans?

14:45That's a great question. It's the bajillion dollar question. It's just a combination of all that. And like I said, it's not a 50-50 split. In certain markets, you just may know these are the ebbs and flows. No matter what, we're trying to scrape as much data as possible because that tells us what the trends look like. That tells us directionally where we're going. We've got dashboards through our data analytics team who do an awesome job and they pull it all into Power BI. So we know, So, hey, yesterday we sold X amount of tickets in Austin and it was 75 degrees. But in Detroit, there was a snowstorm and we only sold negative X tickets.

15:33And we've looked at some of those things and we've seen, it's funny because you generally try to hypothesize like, okay, cool. When it's a blizzard, no one wants to come out. But we've seen that in certain markets, the weather actually doesn't deter people from coming out. And then we've seen in certain markets where it's hot, people need to go somewhere that's cool. And so they want to spend time with us. Obviously, you know, when it's a fall break or a school break or a three day weekend, you know, and you've got nothing to do with your kids, like you're going to come visit us. So we plan accordingly for those types of things.

16:08That's the fun thing. That's the challenging thing is there is a mountain of data and really sifting through to figure out what's meaningful, what's measurable and what we can do with it. I mean, yeah, it's a never ending Rubik's Cube of problem solving. Yeah. Yeah, definitely sounds like it. Are there I mean, earlier you mentioned the PR strategy, working with different PR companies at local levels. Are there any other channels that surprised you when it came to how effective they were in different local cities? That's a good question as well. The one that doesn't surprise me, obviously, influencers.

16:46Like the local influencer guys are bread and butter, I would say. Those perform both as organic and then, you know, we'll usually do brand deals with them. So they become ad units. You know, surprisingly in bigger level markets, like out of home, like radio, like broadcast radio is highly effective. um you know that's something that i'm not a huge fan i need everything to be trackable but we know in certain markets where you know like in la or san francisco um you know even in new york where there's kind of public transit and and a lot of traffic you generally see a lift from broadcast and you can correlate it you know depending on what you're offering or what you're doing like you see a lift two to three weeks later at every time.

17:34I have not heard that lately. So that's, that's a good hot take. Radio can work. It's very like, like, I hate to say like radio is antiquated because like our radio partners will kill me, but it's, it's not the media that you expect it, you know, like you're not going to invest, right. Cause there's just not a one for one ROI, but you start to see that lift in website traffic. You see the lift in ticket sales, you know some brand health we've seen a lift in awareness so I guess it's a hot take but I would say that's the one that surprises me the most really yeah that's that's very good good intel right there of things to explore that maybe others are looking away from right now I mean it's expensive I mean you know it's not you know you can't dump a hundred bucks into radio where you can you know a meta or google and see you know x amount of return but it really depends on what your product is, what your experience is.

18:28So, I mean, we've talked quite a bit on this show about, you know, the new search era with LLMs and ChatGPT, and they are getting better now when it comes to local recommendations. I know back in the day you would search, you know, maybe oil change near me or experiences for kids near me, and it just, you know, had a very hard time. Even if I did put in Austin, Texas, it wasn't up to date. Now they're getting pretty good. And I can see a future where that is where a lot of people are trying to find experiences when your kids are off school on the weekends. How are you thinking about this as part of your discoverability strategy with your customers finding you at a very local level?

19:06Regardless of LLMs, that is part of our strategy is we have to be in the things to do. You know, it's got to be things to do, dot, dot, dot, whatever date night with your kids, whatever. So from an SEO component, that's been a big thing for us. Um, when we go out and work with influencers, we're always trying to fit them into pillars, whether it's date night, family, you know, things like that. Um, and then the LLL, and the other thing too, that we see a lot is especially on Google. And I know I'm kind of like dancing around the LLM side, but follow me here. Google has their things to do product.

19:46And so we were one of the first through our agency to be an organic partner listing rather than an OTA for the things to do platform where you just buy a ticket through that product. That's been highly effective for us and really a great metric of discovery. When it comes to LLM, that's something we're looking at pretty much every day of how we're going through a website refresh. So how do we build the website using the proper schema data? So it's, we are a location, we're a place, we have X. These are the things to do. How do we plant that within the bones of the website rather than us having to write 3 ,000 articles to get boosted up through SEO?

20:34Not to say that we wouldn't do that. But yeah, and we face challenges as well, because there's certain things that get aggregated amongst the LLMs, whether it's through Gemini or ChatGPT or the other ones, where, you know, there's certain things like museum pass. And if you have a museum pass, you get in for free. Well, yes, we have museum in our title, but like, we don't offer free tickets. And so we've had cases where, you know, we're trying to figure out, okay, like people are coming here thinking they can get in for free. how do we address this? And, you know, it goes back to really the bones of the website and making sure that, you know, the structured data and the schema is complete and it, whatever is being aggregated amongst this stuff, you know, we either move out of it or there's a clear message that we're not a part of that.

21:20Yeah. Yeah. I had, um, a recent guest on Mike Walrath. He's the CEO of a company called Yext. I don't know if you've heard of them. Okay. Yeah. So he was showing me, I think it's a new product they have of really how to show up at a local level, like what it takes to be geo-optimized. And we used Anthropologie as the brand that he let me pick live, like pick a brand that we should look at. And you can see it at every retail location, what's preventing them from showing up in geo searches and ranking high. And I'm like, just the amount of data that you can get now to see how do I make sure, you know, my Museum of Illusion show up.

21:55It's wild. So we just onboarded a competitor to Yext. Dun, dun, dun. But we went through the same process and how to optimize where you're missing listings. And you think of these things and you're like, okay, I need to be listed on Google. I need to be listed on Bing. But then there are other sorts of sites that you have no idea that you're like, okay, cool. How much traffic does this bring? but it's just all, it all like adds up, you know, and like all these, you know, scraping tools and things like that are super important. Um, another big thing for us as part of, you know, both LLM discovery and SEO is reviews.

22:37Uh, reviews are a huge factor, especially from a Google perspective, you know, when it comes to things to do, you want to be on, um, you know, your, your, your maps pages, you want to show that this is a positive experience and not just the amount of reviews or your quality score, but the velocity of reviews. You could have a 4.8, there could be an exhibit that's down, and all of a sudden you have a velocity of 50 reviews that come in that give you three out of five stars. And it's like, okay, that's a factor. Those are the most recent reviews. What are we doing to deal with that or challenge that?

23:12And through this Yext Rival that we look at, there's also the ability to pull in all that data and then set up filters as well for keywords, for reviews to be like, hey, we're going to change the prices. How price sensitive are people? And so you can get all the reviews that say, hey, this was too expensive or, hey, this was great value for money. So not only going back to the data, not only are you getting the hard data of what you're seeing in terms of performance, but you're also getting the anecdotal data of what people are saying. And then we ultimately have the choice of like, what are we going to do about this?

23:49Do we need to counter this? Is this something that we have to address or is it something that we don't? So all of those things, like I said, it's a giant Rubik's Cube operating a business, any type of business, but especially a location-based one. It's a living, breathing entity. And when you have customers who come in and have an emotional experience about it. And, you know, they have opinions, you know, and they have opinions at different heights of those emotions. And so trying to sift through that and understand, like, is this relevant or not? That's just another piece of the puzzle. Yeah.

24:31So earlier, I promised that we would shift it to the B2B marketing space and think about how can they take pieces of this and apply it in their own playbook or how can we like translate this to their world. And so I would love to just brainstorm that. I mean, I think the emotional connection piece is a big one that gets lost, but I would just love to hear from you. Like, how do you take what you're doing and bring it into a B2B marketer's world? Yeah. I mean, I think, you know, it really depends from, you know, the B2B perspective, what you truly are marketing. You know, if you're talking like a B2B conference, like there is the experience of the conference, right?

25:09Is it a good conference? Like, what are you offering the consumer, you know, for your conference? What's different than any other conference? You know, is it just in a hotel ballroom with rubber chicken? Or are you doing something over and above that they're going to be like, I have to go to that event because they had X, they had great speakers. The bar is raised for all of these types of, I'll say B2B conferences, but we could talk to, you know, about B2B products as well, but for conferences, the bar is raised, right? And so what's the differentiator for, you know, the participant? Sure, they can see the guest speakers, but could they see them on a podcast?

25:49Can they see them on the person's LinkedIn feed or TikTok feed or whatever? So what are they going to get that's over and above? What are the takeaways they're going to be able to take back with them? And what's going to hook them to come back, you know, to that conference in a year or two years. From the product side, I think about, we use a lot of SaaS products and B2B products. And I think about, from my perspective as a B2C marketer, I always want to challenge my B2B vendors as, okay, these are the things I need for my business. I'm not asking these things from you because I'm special or particular, but these are things that are also going to help you attract other clients in the business.

26:35If I'm asking for this, it's because there's an industry knowledge that comes with it. There's experience that comes with it, or there's a consumer need that we're not able to fulfill. And so my hope is you'll put the development time into this product so then you can turn around and sell it to someone else. Let us do the investing so you can also become bigger and better as well. So I think that's kind of things that you can take away from the B2B side. Hear your client out and understand when they're being challenging or difficult or asking for things. Think about, okay, cool. How can we package this and also sell this to someone else?